Gop Giveth & Taketh Away

Formerly Despised Pork Now A Hefty Part Of Republicans' Diet, As They Make War On Americans In Need.

August 10, 1995|CLARENCE PAGE Chicago Tribune

In his speeches and in his best-selling book, "To Renew America," House Speaker Newt Gingrich likes to call himself a "revolutionary."Now that the first House session of the Newt World Order has gone into August recess, let's see how the revolution goes.

In a matter of days, the revolutionaries cut $137 million from the Head Start preschool program and eliminated 170 other programs, including job training, summer youth employment, the Goals 2000 education improvement program and the entire surgeon general's office.

All of these cuts came in a funding bill for labor, health and education. The Gingrich revolutionaries call for $9 billion less spending than the $70 billion version of the same bill that a Democratic Congress approved last year.

Gingrich's Republican revolutionaries also have proposed a new welfare system that would ship off welfare along with its problems of long-term dependency to the states, yet give the states less money with which to solve the problems. It would include work requirements, but no funding for the job training, job placement or child care many recipients need.

The revolutionaries also have announced plans to cut taxes by $240 billion, which is welcome news to those who are in the brackets to benefit from it, particularly, if the Gingrich revolutionaries have their way, those who pay capital gains taxes.

For others, the savings will be muted somewhat by the revolutionaries' plans to cut Medicare spending by $270 billion over the next seven years, a burden that President Clinton argues will fall heavily on recipients who make less than $25,000 a year.

Medicare's hospital insurance fund will be bankrupt by 2002 if changes are not made, according to an April report by trustees of the Medicare Trust Fund, which includes three Cabinet members.

Gingrich insists that Medicare recipients may have to pay "a little bit" more, but that White House estimates are way too high. Republicans plan to slow the growth of Medicare spending over the next seven years from its current 8.2 percent to 4.9 percent a year. Clinton agrees that cutbacks must be made, but he proposes a timetable that would be slower and gentler to Medicare recipients and their families. The Gingrich revolutionaries seem to think America's elderly are tough enough to take it.

Is there anything the revolutionaries want to spend money on? Ah, need you ask?

They added $7 billion to the defense budget that the Pentagon had not even requested.

They added $1.5 billion in spending for the Seawolf submarine, which is a terrific weapon for fighting the sort of major theater wars the United States has virtually no prospect of fighting in the foreseeable future, except maybe in Tom Clancy novels.

They also ordered the Air Force to buy more B-2 bombers (price tag: $1.2 billion each) days before the controversial plane made news for flunking yet another test. (This time its radar showed an embarrassing inability to distinguish a mountainside from rain.)

The House revolutionaries also distinguished themselves by slashing environmental protection and worker safety laws, and in the closing hours of the session, they gave states the option to deny Medicaid funding for abortions to women who were the victims of rape and incest.

My verdict: Speaker Gingrich's Republican "Contract With America" looks more like a contract (ital) on (end ital) Americans who happen to be in need.

Yet, some things didn't change much with this "revolution."Newsweek finds that pork, so despised by the GOP when it was in the minority, has not disappeared. It has only gone Republican.

For example, the National Endowment for the Arts, long a favorite target of conservatives like House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston, may have been spared an immediate death by a grant to the Piney Woods Opry Folk Festival in Abita Springs, La., which happens to be in Livingston's district.

And the South Texas district of Rep. Greg Laughlin, who switched in June to the Republican Party, received a recent waiver from the Clean Water Act to allow a golf course to be built on local wetlands.

Republicans love to beat up on Democrats for engaging in "class warfare" against the rich. Looks like the Gingrich revolutionaries are not too proud to engage in a little class warfare themselves, particularly against those who are not rich.

Watch for Clinton to make a big issue of this in coming months. He should. It's a gift from the Gingrich revolutionaries.